C.S. Lewis identifies his first experience of Joy to a summer day of his childhood as he stood next to “a flowering currant bush.” Suddenly, there came to him a memory of a toy garden in a tin, but greater than the memory of this simple toy vessel was an accompanying desire— ineffable, merely glimpsed, and always followed by “a longing for the longing that had just ceased.” Lewis would go onto describe three other occasions within his youth where this desire would overtake him. In fact, so persistent is the theme of Joy in Lewis’s life that the pursuit and recognition of this Joy would become an important feature in Lewis’s spiritual journey from atheism to Christian theism—even becoming part of the title of his spiritual autobiography “Surprised by Joy.” Joy clearly was an important concept for Lewis and in order to understand this piece of his biography, and our own, we will need to look at the nature of this Joy as Lewis looked for it throughout his youth and early adulthood. Next, we will looks at how Lewis defines Joy from a select portion of his oeuvre and focuses on Lewis’s early misidentifications of Joy with sex. Finally, we will conclude by showing how Lewis’s proper identification of Joy with “heaven” can help us our personal journey of seeking “Joy.”
Joy Discovered and Defined
Lewis defines Joy in many places in his writing, but some of the clearest exposition of his thinking on the topic comes in two places: his two spiritual autobiographies “The Pilgrim’s Regress” and “Surprised by Joy.” Lewis wrote “The Pilgrim’s Regress” in August 1932 just a short time after his conversion to Christianity. In the book he presents an allegorical picture of a pilgrim, John, discovering desire in the idea of an island and then setting out to lay claim of it. In the “Afterword” to the book, Lewis further defines what he meant by Joy and how it differs from other human desires. The first way that Joy differs from other desires is that “the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight.” Whereas other desires only find fulfillment in their being satisfied or in the future expectation of their satisfaction, the longing for the satisfaction of Joy is itself satisfying. In “Surprised by Joy,” Lewis similarly describes Joy “as never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” Thus, enjoyment despite a lack of hope of future satisfaction distinguishes Joy from other desires. As Joe Puckett writes, this lack of satisfaction is why Lewis differentiated “Joy” from “joy,” because “it offers Joy even without any final satisfaction that normally accompanies typical joy.”
The second way, according to Lewis, that Joy differs from other desires is that other desires have a clear object of their reference, but Joy comes without a clear reference—it is ineffable. Lewis writes that “There is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people…suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring.” However, after listing many of the ways that Joy is misidentified, Lewis concludes that “every one of these impressions is wrong…Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it.” For Lewis the reason why the object of this “Desire” is unidentifiable is because the object itself is transcendent and stands above any particular desire that may be found on Earth. In fact, it seems that Lewis most readily identified Joy as a longing for a place—heaven—in which one is able to meet God and have a personal relationship with him. For example, in “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” Joy is discovered by the pilgrim John as vision of a distant island in the midst of a sea. Writing shortly after his conversion, Lewis envisioned the desire of Joy as arising for a longing of a transcendent space in which God could be met.
Finally, Joy is not subject to the will or dependent on a state of mind, distinguishing it from mere pleasure. Lewis again makes this clear in a biographical sketch in where he tries to summon Joy, “thence arose the fatal determination to recover the old thrill [Joy], and at last the moment when I was compelled to realize that all such efforts were failures. I had no lure to which the bird would come.” Thus, for Lewis it was useless to search for or to lay traps waiting to capture Joy; it rose unbidden when it desired and left in the same way. Therefore, from the above exposition, Stewart Goetz’s summary of Lewis’s understanding of Joy is appropriate: “Joy” is “a ceaseless longing or desire for a place that cannot be satisfied by anything in this life.”
Joy Misidentified
The ineffability of Joy allows for the desire aroused by Joy to settle on a lesser object of joy in the search for its identity. One such misidentification that Lewis made himself is to identify Joy with sex. Lewis’s personal sexuality was complicated. Lewis admits that early on he had lost his virginity and explored the joy of sexuality unbridled. There were more disturbing elements to this type of exploration: notably his early fascination with sadomasochism and his illicit affair with Mrs. Moore—the mother of his Oxford roommate, Paddy Moore. Lewis’s wrestling with sexuality as “Joy” are also clearly displayed in his writings. In “The Pilgrim’s Regress” the Lewisian pilgrim, John, satiates his quest for the desire of the island by engaging in sexual adventures with a native girl. Lewis perceptively knew the pull of sexual desire to misidentify the telos of Joy in the fountains of its pleasures. Sex, like the girl to the pilgrim John, says “It was me you wanted…I am better than your silly islands.” Lewis admits that he “came to know by experience that [Joy] is not a disguise of sexual desire…by the simple, if discreditable, process of repeatedly making it.” Lewis tread the path of misidentifying Joy with sexual desire many times only to find it a dead end. Thus, an older Lewis could reflect in his autobiography that “Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy.” The way that Lewis made his way from the quagmire of sex as Joy to Joy as the land of God and his attendant presence was through the long, hard road of experience. Again, Lewis wrote, “I repeatedly followed that path—to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure…was not what you had been looking for.” Even in the time close to his conversion, Lewis wrote in “The Pilgrim’s Regress” that the pleasure of sex with the native girl waned and “the appearance of her was hateful” to him. Tellingly Lewis’s next chapter in which John runs from the girl is entitled “Quem Quaeritis in Sepulchro? Non est Hic,” the Latin of Luke 24: 5-6 “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.” Lewis realized that he would not find the living Joy he sought in the places where dead things congregate. Joy would not be found there among unbridled sexuality and Lewis would need to search for Joy somewhere else.
Joy Applied
Lewis knew that Joy and its pursuit is a driving force in the heart of man; thus, it is fitting then that Lewis would write in his most famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” that we are too often “half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite Joy is offered us.” Truly, this was the case for Lewis personally and many have gone to his writings the same and found a guide to Joy. In my own story I found Lewis to be a reliable guide. I had gone as a missionary to Japan but discovered there a world of hedonism that whispered to me that this was Joy. I followed the advice of these false suitors and indulged in all types of behavior that I believed would provide Joy. After two years of searching for Joy in these pursuits, I found myself more unhappy and haunted by my own vision of Joy that I returned to the United States—disillusioned, angry at God, and trying to understand the frustration of Joy misidentified. In the time that I had to convalesce I read Lewis’s “The Pilgrim’s Regress” and found that within Lewis’s understanding of the search and misidentification of Joy, I could also make sense of my own story. Lewis’s use of Luke 24:5-6 was especially significant for me as I found that my own story had been shaped by a pervasive search for Joy among the “dead” things, but that with the living Christ was where Joy was to be found. Thus, Lewis, the former pilgrim, became a guide for me, leading me to understand my own search, desires, and their ultimate telos. I hope that Lewis can do the same for you.
Stephen Roberson is the director for the Pacifica Center for Philosophy & Theology.
Goetz, Stewart. C.S. Lewis. Blackwell great minds. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 26.
Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017.
The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
Lewis, C. S., Michael Hague, and David C. Downing. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Wade annotated edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014.
McGrath, Alister E. C.S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. Carol Stream, Ill: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013.
The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, a John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication, 2014.
Puckett, Joe. Apologetics of Joy: A Case for the Existence of God from C.S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire, 2013.